Written by Kep
Mære – …and the Universe Keeps Silent
> Dissonant death metal
> Germany
> Releasing April 19
> Transcending Obscurity Records
German dissonant death outfit Mære prefer their existence and their music alike be shrouded in the thick shadows of darkness and mystery. Their 2020 debut EP I—which I joked was the second-best EP named I off all time behind Meshuggah’s—dropped with support from Lavadome Productions but little fanfare, the project’s Bandcamp listing no member names or production credits. The song titles were themed but cryptic: “I”, “I, Devouring”, “I Descend”, “I Ascend”, “I Am”, and “I, Transcending”. The cover art of the EP, and of their subsequent single and this new album, is minimalistic and abstruse. Their social media presence is limited to periodic posts of surreal artwork with enigmatic lyric excerpts. The members real names aren’t hard to find if you know where to look, sure, but here the three go only by IV, V, and V . So yeah, mysterious and inscrutable is the name of the game for Mære. And the music? Pitch black and swimming with unfathomable horrors.
…and the Universe Keeps Silent is not the sort of album you listen to when you’re looking for a good time. I mean, unless your version of a good time is floating helplessly in an inky void, eldritch tendrils licking at your back, peering in fear at hideous faces just on the edge of being seen. Five tracks span 37 minutes of undulating, writhing, brutalizing darkness, uncomfortable hanging harmonies phasing out of jagged riffs and stop-start drums. The songs are narrative living things with sections that both push and pull at the pace, crunching then expanding, sometimes occupying a single feeling for a trancelike amount of extended time.
Mære’s sound is more stripped back than many other bands that occupy the same space. The mix is roomy and a bit on the dryer side, but without the rawness of, say, an Acausal Intrusion. It’s an approach that takes a few minutes for the ear to warm up to, especially if you’re unaccustomed to this sort of cerebrally disturbing avant-garde dissodeath, but it’s one that suits the unhurried, spacious writing of Mære particularly well. In their stygian void each of III’s twanging riffs, every thud and pop from V’s kit, every chesty rasp from I—a founding member of the project who features here as a session performer—is measured and given ample space to stand. This isn’t to say it sounds weak, either, because it’s a prodigious sound; IV’s bass clatters audibly down in the basement while the drums have a hearty depth to their tone, providing an ample foundation upon which brutalist structures are built from riff and roar.
“All Those Things We’ve Never Been (The Grandeur of Nihilism)” clangs dissonantly into being before establishing a lurching rhythmic center, driving forward for a measure or several before hanging suspended, then pitching headlong again. It, like most of the album’s tracks, is a measured and unhurried thing; even its blast beat passages and final chaotic stretch of forceful riffage and frenzied shouted vocals feel purposefully held back. After nearly seven minutes the music fades and a sample from the famous “Now I am become death” recording of Robert Oppenheimer acts as a transition. “Traumlande (Ascending the Abyss)”, for its part, also begins with ominous deliberateness, this time employing bits of spoken word across a lengthy sort of intro section. Once the body of the track has fully arrived at about 2:45, the existential menace, menacing in its intensity, is impressive to behold.
You’ll find that for all their cohesive ugliness and atmosphere, the tracks feel remarkably different from one another. Centerpiece “The Darkness is Your Mother” establishes a pounding six-beat rhythm as its main motif, which makes the very bones of the song feel distorted and unnatural when they start to add and subtract beats from it after a minute or so. Grandiose yet intimate, brutal yet meticulously intricate, it’s here that I think the band does their best work yet. There’s a moment where nearly everything drops away and only the unending double bass kicks carry on, adorned with strangely colored guitar; the gradual build back to the enormity of the full band sound feels inevitable, and indeed it is, but that incessant bass drum run never relents, even as it’s overcome by clanging chords and unhinged roars. It’s magical stuff.
The album closes with “Zdrowas Mario (Building the Temple)” and “Think of Me as Fire”, the two preview singles. “Zdrowas Mario”—“Hail Mary” in Polish—finds a few gnarly ditch grooves and rolls in them, creating an ugly meditation on violence before ending with voices overlapping in spoken word. “Think…”, which actually first came out in 2021 as a standalone track, strikes an immaculate balance between ferocity and atmosphere and works simultaneously as a great lead single and a natural closer, bellowing and leaning and staggering heavily to its conclusion of eerie backward tones.
THE BOTTOM LINE
…and the Universe Keeps Silent is essentially the platonic ideal of a dissonant death metal album. It’s hideous but impossible to look away from, a disquieting tapestry woven from unnatural heaving riffs with just the right amount of existential atmosphere and experimental touches. Mære are inviting you to peer into the inner darkness where horrors wait; are you afraid of what you might see?